Disillusionment

 [Originally written September 9 2020]

Erika and Beth seemed pretty happy in my Creatures 2 world… happy enough to stay put in the incubator cave. Which was fine, I guess, but rather boring. And I was not looking forward to sitting through the males doing the same routine after Beth and Erika passed away, so that got me to thinking… What if I sent them out into the world and let everyone live out their lives at once, but kept the girls in the incubator room to prevent breeding? So I temporarily exported Beth and Erika, and brought the boys in!

Whatever weirdness had caused Beth’s aging was definitely not one-off, as the only visibly old Norn I’d had in Creatures 1 was Aaron, but on import, all the boys except young Edmund had aged. It left the previously charming Derek looking rather unappealing, with his bald head and lanky, disproportionate limbs. Carlos and Damien (not pictured, but very similar to Carlos) fared rather better in old age. I herded all five of them out into the desert, but they didn’t want to spread out too much, so I decided to scatter them across the world via teleporter and transport.

Aaron steadfastly remained in the desert. I was a bit concerned about him getting food up there, to be honest, but I figured I could bring him cheese if needed.

Edmund, who retained his good looks, was the most keen on exploring, crossing the bridge and going to visit Smaug, who was still obsessing over the weather in his treeside garden. His presence here gave me a small degree of comfort a short while later, when I discovered that the cloud-loving Grendel had quietly passed on at roughly two hours old; at least he was not alone. Even not considering their awkwardly-modeled appearance, I can see why I was never too fond of the Creatures 2 Grendels, with such short lifespans.

Derek had found his way (either by boat or by pufferfish) to the island, which I was happy about until I realized that creatures can’t pass through from the dock to the volcano cone, which came as a surprise to me! I had always thought they could go through there. I brought him back to the desert since there was nothing for him to do or eat on the dock, but not before snapping a picture of him looking for all the world like an old tribal guru of some sort!

I had tried to get Carlos to go to the teleporter near the cheese dispenser in the underground tunnel below the incubator cave, but that part of the world seems terribly glitchy, and in attempting to push him over whatever boundary Norns have such a hard time getting over, I seem to have… broken him. I feel a little bad about it, even though it’s not really my fault. His brain activity seems normal, and he’s not physically stuck, as I can bring him up and down on the lift. But he just… stands there, unmoving. I did manage to successfully send Damien off through a teleporter, though, and he ended up by the tantris bush, from where he found his way to the telescope overlooking the waterfall. 

I took a brief intermission from dispersing my Norns around Albia to mount another Grendel rescue operation – although, now knowing how short their lives are, I did not exert as much effort teaching little Sauron. I simply lured him onto the lift, brought him up to the surface level, taught him even fewer words than I’d taught Smaug, and called the elevator back down once he’d stepped away from it. Sorry, little guy, you’re on your own now.

Suddenly, one of my alarms went off! These things would admittedly be much more useful if they told you who actually set them off, and I lost a great deal of valuable time tabbing through my creatures to figure out whose crisis this was. It turned out to be Damien, who had fallen into the goldfish pond near the Shee labs. Despite the delay in finding him, I hauled him out of the water and set to work with the injections, and I managed to save the poor fool. I promptly guided him away from the pond to avoid repeats.

Aaron was still in the desert, so I lured him to a teleporter, which ended up taking him to the treehouses over the waterfall – a nice place for the old Norn to live, I think, so I left him there. Damien apparently decided he also wanted a waterfall view, because he made his way down to the aubergine biopods and settled down in there. Damien go-go indeed!

Admittedly, I’ve made this all sound much more exciting than it was. Frankly, the whole experience left me a bit disillusioned. I’ve played this game in the past, and with everything I’ve read about the community’s general consensus that Creatures 2 wasn’t a very good game, I kept saying to myself, “oh, come on, it’s not that bad!” But the truth is… it kind of is. I suppose I probably never realized this before because, as I said, I never really bothered with the Ettins and Grendels in C2, so I never realized how much they got screwed over, and my playstyle with the Norns was considerably different. In Creatures 2, for some reason, I always kept a very small number of Norns, maybe one to three, and I liked having them stay in one place unless I was personally leading them out on an adventure. So I suppose it’s natural that the creatures’ reluctance to explore or move about on their own, and the admittedly broken game world, didn’t really bother me before. My eyes have definitely been opened to this game’s flaws, and that’s not a pleasant experience.

Still, I do have an ace up my sleeve that may salvage the game for me…